Bio
Melisa Tien is the librettist of the operas Family Heirloom (Experiments in Opera, 2024), The Big Swim (Asia Society Texas Center/Houston Grand Opera, 2024), Forever (Washington National Opera American Opera Initiative, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023); primary lyricist of the music-theater works Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving; and author of the plays Best Life (JACK, 2022), Yellow Card Red Card (Ice Factory, 2017), The Boyd Show, and Familium Vulgare. She has been published in the anthologies Theater Artists Making Theatre With No Theater (Tripwire Harlot Press, 2020) and Modern Music for New Singers: 21st Century American Art Songs (North Star Music, 2021). She is currently a librettist for the American Opera Project’s 2023-2025 Composers & the Voice project and a member of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative. She was a member of Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2022 Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera’s 2022 Writers’ Room, The Assembly Theater Project’s 2021 Deceleration Lab, a recipient of a 2020-2021 grant from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre, and a 2016 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting. BA, UCLA; MFA, Columbia University.
www.melisatien.com
